Will electronic games take the place of table games? I dunno. But there plenty of things that are just silly about electronic games that would never fly in a table top game.

1. Run the same adventure over and over until everyone gets the loot they want
2. Have the party wait around because some other party killed the what you needed to kill
3. Go out of the dungeon to grind a few levels so they beat the monsters
4. Do a patch that requires all of the players to rewrite their characters
5. Have strangers show up to your game and offer to sell you gold. Just give them your credit card number.
6. NPC’s with very sense and know how to say only one or two things.
7.Quests that consist of “Talk to the guy standing next to me.”
8. Quests that consist of killing animals for their internal organs. Mysteriously half of the animals don’t have these organs.
9. Sometimes normal animals are carrying magic items for loot that would be impossible for the creature to carry/eat/have on its body in any way.
10. A TPK is just another way of saying “Do Over”.

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6 Responses to “Ten Things that are OK in MMO’s but not in a table top game.”

As a note, I have seen both 3 and 9 in action in games. 9 is particularly common in “old school” games in which the treasure for a wandering monster is rolled up after the combat is done. It does break immersion, but it happens.

As for 4, all I have to say is “3.5”. More generically, I’ve seen dozens of cases in which players want to rewrite their character sheets to take advantage of the latest splatbook.

First, we’ve changed systems on a couple occasions and kept the characters. From Fantasy Wargaming to Arcana to AD&D, for example (this was back when I was a teenager living in a small town so just finding a new game was an upgrade!). More recently, from GURPS 3rd to GURPS 4th, only a few small tweaks.

I actually built a campaign around the second. This was a GURPS campaign in which I tried to use as many books as I could. Every few sessions, the world would “shift” and the characters would go from being cowboys (for example) to postapocalyptic bikers to cavemen to mech pilots. Each time, the same characters had to be redrawn using the new setting’s options.

These would be kind of hilarious for an intentionally silly game. Especially #1. Imagine redoing the same basic trope-ridden quest, only it gets increasingly surreal every time you do it. The first few times are identical, but then the NPC begins rambling incoherently and the spiral staircase has become an escalator and the princess is updating her Twitter account and needs to finish charging her blackberry for you can rescue her.. and it only gets worse from there.

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